Webb Chiles

Briefly in the Third Person: Webb Chiles is a writer and a sailor, an artist of words and wind. Married six times, he has lived with passion on land as well as water and at one time liked to believe himself an artist of women, too, but this may have been a delusion. As a writer: seven books and hundreds of articles published. As a sailor: five circumnavigations and several world records; and long ago he became the first American to sail alone around Cape Horn. He wanted to live an epic life. Perhaps he has. Read his books and decide for yourself. At Greater Length in the First: Twice in my life I have lost everything. Once the loss occurred over a period of years while I was sailing CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE, an 18' open boat, west around the world. When I was falsely imprisoned as a spy in Saudi Arabia in 1982, I did not own a single object, not a teaspoon or a t-shirt, that I had owned when I sailed from San Diego, California, in 1978. The second loss was as complete but took place during a single night in 1992 when I sank the 36' sloop, RESURGAM, off the coast of Florida, following which I floated and swam for 26 hours and was carried more than 125 miles by the Gulf Stream before reaching an anchored fishing vessel. I mention this only partly in pride that I lived on the edge and risked everything for so long--as I once wrote: almost dying is a hard way to make a living--but also because it explains omissions. Possessions can usually be replaced, but some of my writing and many photographs were lost and can't be. "Old men should be explorers." I first read that decades ago in a book by Jan de Hartog, but subsequently came across it in T. S. Eliot's FOUR QUARTETS, which predates Hartog by several decades. I don't know if there is an even earlier source. Now that I am seventy, those words are even more true. For the past several years I have divided my time between being with Carol, an architect and my wife of sixteen years, in a condominium in Evanston, Illinois, and my 37' sloop, THE HAWKE OF TUONELA, in New Zealand's Bay of Islands. But recently I have been thinking of living on the edge again. "Small" and "age" are edges. So I have just bought a 24' sloop, possibly for my next voyage. Having completed circumnavigations in four successive decades--two in the 00s, I'd like to make it five. People who know of me at all probably do so as a sailor; but I have always thought of myself as an artist, and I believe that the artist's defining responsibility is to go to the edge of human experience and send back reports. My books are among those reports. Update November 11, 2021 The age of miracles has not passed. I am eighty years old today. Few, if any, including me, expected I would reach such an age. ‘Almost dying is a hard way to make a living’, I once wrote, and I have almost died more times than I can easily recall. It goes with the territory of pushing beyond the edge of human experience. Either I was very good or I was very lucky. Perhaps both. I completed my sixth circumnavigation on April, 29, 2019, in GANNET, my ultra-light Moore 24, when we reached San Diego. I now mostly live in a condo on South Carolina’s Hilton Head Island overlooking Skull Creek which is a part of the Intracoastal Waterway. GANNET is docked five hundred feet away. I can see her mast from our windows and deck. This is where I am now. Carol, who is still working as an architect near Chicago, is also here. Hilton Head Island has a wonderful climate from October to May, but is too hot in the summer with heat indexes routinely 105ºF. So I am considering sailing somewhere cooler next summer. Iceland sounds cool. Carol and I will spend the day quietly. I’ll go down and sit on GANNET for a while and consider what I’ve done with my life and what I might still do. This evening we will go out to dinner and when we return I’ll pour some of my favorite liquid, Laphroaig 10 year old single malt Scotch, and raise my glass to you and to me and to our dreams and the passion to fulfill them. To Life. For more information please visit: www.inthepresentsea.com